In the summer of 2001 Sofka Zinovieff accompanied her husband, Vassilis — first met when he was press officer to the Greek embassy in Moscow — on a posting back to Athens. This book is both an account of her enthusiastic, if often balked, attempts to transform herself into a Greek, and a vivid evocation of a city in a chaotic ferment of change.
That change is at once demonstrated when the couple find a flat, undistinguished except for a tremendous view, in Vouliagmeni, 18 kilometres from the centre of the city. Some 60 years ago, when I used to visit Vouliagmeni before a direct road had been constructed to it, it was little more than a village, with a glorious crescent of a beach backed by a few simple cafés and tavernas. Now Zinovieff can refer to it as ‘Athens’s version of a Riviera’.
Zinovieff finds a relentlessly garrulous Greek maid, who, in the manner of Greek maids, within a few weeks transcends her domestic role to become both mentor and confidante. The two Zinovieff daughters accommodate themselves to their new life far more quickly than does their mother. Soon, in an attempt to obtain Greek citizenship, Zinovieff is fighting her way, with a mixture of determination and despair, through the labyrinth of a bureaucracy determined to frustrate her. Repeatedly friends advise her that to expedite the process she should use mesa (influence). Though General Metaxas once heroically gave a definite and final ‘Ochi’ to the Axis, the right mesa — or even rousfeti (bribe) — can all too often turn an Ochi into a Perhaps or even a Yes.
When not involved in all these problems of adjustment, Zinovieff explores the life of a city that she finds, like many travellers before her, both endlessly stimulating and exasperating.
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